Droid 2 Includes MotoBlur, but Motorola Stops Talking About UI

Motorola introduced the Droid 2 with nary a mention of its MotoBlur user interface. Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha says the UI will be included on future smartphones, it just won't be advertised.

Motorola will continue to include its MotoBlur user interface on
Android-running handsets, but will stop putting resources into the promotion of
the UI as a brand, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha
said during a conference call announcing the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings.
"We have found that being able to convey the value proposition around
MotoBlur is not an easy thing to do in a 30-second ad spot," Jha said
during the July 29 call. "We have decided that we will focus on the value
proposition of products and not MotoBlur as a brand name in its own
right."

Jha's comment comes as Google prepares to launch Android 3.0, code-named
Gingerbread-one
recent report predicted the Android 3.0 launch would be in mid-October-which is expected
to make interfaces such as MotoBlur redundant.

HTC similarly makes a UI, Sense, built to
run on top of Android and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices. Like Android 3.0,
the Windows Phone 7 OS is expected to exert greater control over the device
than earlier versions of the operating system. Regardless, HTC
still plans to include Sense on HTC handsets
running Windows Phone 7, Drew
Bamford, head of HTC's user experience design team, told Forbes in a July
report.
"We won't be able to replace as much of the core Windows Phone
experience, but we will augment it," Bamford said, according to Forbes.
On Aug. 10, Motorola introduced the
Droid 2 smartphone, and true to Jha's word, there was no mention of
MotoBlur. However, press
materials did boast that the smartphone lets users "stay up-to-date
with friends using the preloaded social networking widgets that allow you to
sync and stream your feeds and updates from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to
one screen in real time"-language that previously might have described
MotoBlur.

"MotoBlur continues to be important and I think you will see increased
functionality in MotoBlur," Jha said during the earnings call. "But
as a brand name ... I don't think that's going to be our focus going forward, but
we see the experience that we deliver as being relevant and differentiating
us."

Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.